Geert Lovink on Weizenbaum and the Society of the Query
i am posting here commentary/book review by Geert Lovink sent to the nettime-l list today. The book is Joseph Weizenbaum mit Gunna Wendt, Wo sind sie, die Inseln der Vernunft
im Cyberstrom, Auswege aus der programmierten Gesellschaft, Herder
Verlag, Freiburg, 2006.
the translated title of which can be said to be (Lovink´s translation:
“Where are they, the islands of reason
in the cyber stream? Ways out of the programmed society.”
some of the more key phrases that struck a chord for me were (and their compilation suggests some kind of article summary):A spectre haunts the world's intellectual elites: information
overload...
Not only are
popular noise levels up to unbearable levels, the chatter has entered
the domain of science and philosophy itself--thanks to the indifferent
Google. Search engines rank according to popularity, not Truth...
I do not believe that it is up to any professor or editor to decide
for us what is, and what is not nonsense. I would much rather like to
further revolutionize search tools and increase the general level of
media literacy....
Let’s forget Weizenbaum’s info
anxiety. What makes this interview book an interesting read is his
insistence on the art of asking the right question....
What we need instead of Google and Wikipedia, is the
“capacity to scrutinize and think critically.”...
For the time being we remain obsessed with
the increase in quality of the answer to our queries—and not with the
underlying problem, namely the poor quality of our education and the
diminishing ability to think in a critical way....
Every information, any object or experience has to be at hand
instantaneous. Serendipity requires a lot of time. If we can no longer
stumble into islands of reason through our inquiries, we may as well
have to build them. By definition these island will be artificial,
and, most likely, digital in nature.
---
Now, let me comment on Lovink´s piece. I think it is that we start to face an information overload situation, in a professional context even. And this is in an environment where we have not yet even realised the/this full Open Access dream. The question of info overload then has done turns in my mind in recent times, since yes, it is a matter which needs addressing. To phrase it in the latter way does not mean that there aren´t good people doing good work on info retrieval. (See for instance the wonderful Photosynth demo
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 which, when thought of in and projected into the context of scholarly communication, makes you feel glad to have been born in these times (smile)). But think, and here is where I concur with Lovink, it is that people need to have/develop the skills to discern the level of quality of the work that is before them. Humans are innately adaptable are they not? What I disagree on is this either/or scenario suggested by Lovink when he says:
What we need instead of Google and Wikipedia, is the
“capacity to scrutinize and think critically.”...
It´s not a matter of "instead". Rather, it is a case of _because_ we have these kinds of tools (of which Google and Wikip are mere current instances; there will be others), that we need the “capacity to scrutinize and think critically.”
Then, as for the conclusion, I do wonder. Can it be that these spaces (islands) will be digital. If on the one hand, the piece calls for greater intellectual effort and discernment (things that happen in the human brain), then why can those spaces for serendipity not be constituted (also) of areas of mind, and not just be envisioned as some digital realm.
Think of it this way. Serendipity always (and I speak empirically) is a private event occurring between you and the information object, and the question which arises is where exactly is the locus of the serendipitous action (in among the bookstacks, say, or, while reading a digi article). what we tend to think is that the environment (physical or digital), shapes the experience and is therefore its locus. but isn´t it rather, that the environment are mere trappings, and the locus of the serendipitous event is the private space in there in your mind where "things come together"? so, isn´t the islands of reason still, essentially, in the mind?
okay, so what if we need to consider communal spaces, and some kind of group-think (not meant in its perjorative sense) scenario. well, then, i don´t know as yet :-)
---
The entire piece:-------- Mensaje original --------
Asunto: Weizenbaum and the Society of the Query
Fecha: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 09:25:10 +0200
De: Geert Lovink
Responder a: Geert Lovink
Para: nettime-l@kein.org
Weizenbaum and the Society of the Query
By Geert Lovink
A spectre haunts the world's intellectual elites: information
overload. Ordinary people have hijacked strategic resources and
are clogging up once carefully policed media channels. Before the
Internet, the mandarin classes were able to strictly separate 'idle
talk' from 'knowledge. With the rise of Internet search engines it is
no longer possible to easily distinguish between patrician insights
and plebeian gossip. The distinction between high and low, and the
occasional mix during Carnival, are from all times and should not
greatly worry us. What is causing alarm is another issue. Not only are
popular noise levels up to unbearable levels, the chatter has entered
the domain of science and philosophy itself--thanks to the indifferent
Google. Search engines rank according to popularity, not Truth.
What today's administrators of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur
can't express, we should say for them: there is a growing discontent
in the search algorithms. The scientific establishment has lost
control over one of its key research projects, computer science
and the enlightened citizens and statesmen have so far not found
a way to communicate their concerns to those in charge (read:
the Google board). One possible way out could be to overcome to
positively redefine Heidegger's 'Gerede' as 'being of everyday
Dasein's understanding and interpreting'. Are Internet users cut off
from a a primary and primordial relationship with the world? Should we
portrayal bloggers and the Web 2.0 cybermasses as 'uprooted' and cut
off from the existantial?
These questions, and more, came up while reading an of book of
interviews with MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, known from the
computer therapy program ELIZA and his 1976 book Computer Power
and Human Reason. The publication is in German. A few years ago
Weizenbaum (b. 1923) moved back to Berlin, the city where he grew up
before he and his parents escaped from Nazis. The interviews were
conducted by Munich-based journalist Gunna Wendt. A number of Amazon
reviewers complained about Wendts uncritical questions and the
polite-superficial level of her contributions. No doubt interesting
are Weizenbaums stories about his youth in Berlin, the exile to the
USA and the way he got involved in computing during the 1950s. The
book indeed reads like a summary of Weizenbaums critique of computer
science. What interested me was the way in which Weizenbaum shapes
his arguments as an informed and respected insider (the net criticism
position, so to say). The title and subtitle sound intriguing.
Translated it goes like this: Where are they, the islands of reason
in the cyber stream? Ways out of the programmed society.
Weizenbaums Internet critique is general. He avoids becoming
specificand I appreciate that attitude. His Internet remarks are
nothing new for those familiar with Weizenbaums work: Internet
is a great pile of junk, a mass medium that up to 95% consists of
nonsense, much like the medium television, in which direction the
Web is inevitably developing. The so-called information revolution
has flipped into a flood of disinformation. The reason for this is
the absence of an editor or editorial principle. Why this crucial
media principle was not built-in by the first generations of computer
programmers, of which Weizenbaum was a prominent member, the book
fails to address.
On a number of occasions I have formulated a critique of such media
ecology, Hubert Dreyfus On the Internet (2001) being one of them.
I do not believe that it is up to any professor or editor to decide
for us what is, and what is not nonsense. I would much rather like to
further revolutionize search tools and increase the general level of
media literacy. If we walk into a book store or library our culture
has taught us how to browse through the thousands of titles. Instead
of complaining to the librarian that they carry too many books, we
call in assistance, or find the way ourselves. Weizenbaum would
like us to distrust what we see on our screens, be it television or
Internet. Who is going to tell what to trust, what is the truth and
what not, Weizenbaum doesnt mention. Lets forget Weizenbaums info
anxiety. What makes this interview book an interesting read is his
insistence on the art of asking the right question. Weizenbaum warns
for an uncritical use of the word information. The signals inside
the computer are not information. They are not more than signals.
There is only one way to turn signals into information, through
interpretation. For this we depend on the labour of the human brain.
The problem of the Internet, so Weizenbaum, is that it invites us
to see it as a Delphi oracle. To all our questions and problems,
the Internet will provide you the answer. But the Internet is not a
vending machine in which you throw a coin and then get what you want.
First of all there are plenty of obstacles before one can even pose a
question, like class, race and gender. Key is that you need to have
a proper education in order to formulate the right query. Its all
about how one gets to pose the right question. Weizenbaum: It doesnt
mean much that everyone can publish on the Net. Random publishing is
as useless as random fishing. In this context Weizenbaum makes the
comparison between Internet and now vanished CB radio. Communication
alone will not lead to useful and sustainable knowledge.
Weizenbaum relates the uncontested belief in (search engine) queries
to the rise of the problem discourse. Computers were introduced
as general problem solvers and a solution for everything. People
were invited to delegate their lives to the computer. We have a
problem, so Weizenbaum, and the problem requires an answer. But
personal and social tensions cannot be resolved through by declaring
them a problem. What we need instead of Google and Wikipedia, is the
capacity to scrutinize and think critically. Weizenbaum explains
this with the difference between hearing and listening. For a critical
understanding we first have to sit down and listen. Then we also need
to read, not just decipher, and learn to interpret and understand.
As were all aware, the so-called Web 3.0 is going to be the
technocratic answer to Weizenbaums criticism. Instead of Googles
algorithms that are based on keywords and an output based on ranking,
soon we will be able to ask questions to the next generation of
natural language search engines such as Powerset. However, we can
already guess that these computational linguists will not question the
problem-answering approach and will be wary to act as professional
expert who will decide what is and whats not crap on the Internet.
The same counts for the semantic Web school and similar artificial
intelligence technologies. Ever since the rise of search engines in
the 1990s we seem to be stuck in the Society of the Query, which,
as Weizenbaum indicates, isnt that much different from Debords
Society of the Spectacle. The complete reannotation of the worlds
information isnt going to solve the inevitable issue, also raised by
Andrew Keen in his Cult of the Amateur, about the future status of
the professional expert. For the time being we remain obsessed with
the increase in quality of the answer to our queriesand not with the
underlying problem, namely the poor quality of our education and the
diminishing ability to think in a critical way. I am skeptical if
next generations will discover Weizenbaums islands of reasons .
The culture of time is simply not there to stroll around , like a
flaneur. Every information, any object or experience has to be at hand
instantaneous. Serendipity requires a lot of time. If we can no longer
stumble into islands of reason through our inquiries, we may as well
have to build them. By definition these island will be artificial,
and, most likely, digital in nature.
--
Joseph Weizenbaum mit Gunna Wendt, Wo sind sie, die Inseln der Vernunft
im Cyberstrom, Auswege aus der programmierten Gesellschaft, Herder
Verlag, Freiburg, 2006.
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
# is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.orgLabels: geert lovink, information overload, open access
prior to 29 June, the way to find out of a journal (publisher) was well-disposed to Open Access, you would hop along to
SHERPA/RoMEO to check the publisher copyright policy and whether they favoured self-archiving or not...
another measure would have been to see whether there was an Open Access journal for your article over at
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) at Lund University.
now we have a new service from Lund University, called
Journal Info.
what i like about the service is its one-stop-shop approach. where "full info" for a journal has been compiled, you can see the following info organised around three categories of "reader accessiblity", "cost", and "quality", with respective associated indicators.
(i chose one of my favourite journals: Research Policy, just to illustrate):
Research PolicyISSN: 00487333
Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
Homepage: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00487333
Subject: Science (General)
First published year: 1972 Reader accessibility
Open Access: No
Allows self-archiving of reviewed manuscript: Yes Hybrid: No
Alternative journals with Open Access: The Journal of Philosophy, Science and Law PoS - Proceedings of Science Ingenierías Songklanakarin Journal of Science and Technology more alternative journals ...
Cost
Subscription price per article: $20.46
Subscription price per citation: $12.21
Profit-Status: For-Profit Quality
Databases indexing the journal: Social Sciences Citations Index --- International Political Science Abstract --- Compendex --- ABI/Inform
Journal eigenfactor: 0.012579
Article Influence: 1.0516
FRIDA score: High ISI impact factor: Available to Journal Citation Report subscribers the above info is
(cc) by-nc-sawell, the copy&paste didn´t do justice to the info display over at the service itself, so have a look already(!).
i like particularly that price info is given. so that individual researchers can see the price their institutions pay for their favourite journals (info for which is usually opaque in the higher education system). further, i like that there is a listing of OA alternatives, and that one also gets an idea of the related journals in languages other than English.
see informational/promotional e-mail copied below:
----
Subject: Journal Info - information about journals with an OA-twist (
http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/)
Dear All,
Lund University Libraries has, with financial support from the National Library of Sweden, put together a new tool to support researchers in their choice of journal for publication. The service, called ”Journal Info”, gives fast and simple access to journal information through a web interface,
http://jinfo.lub.lu.se. The journal information is divided up in general, accessibility, cost and quality and each area is supported by a number of relevant points. You can e.g. find in which databases a journal is indexed, how much it costs for the library to subscribe and which alternative OA journals exists. A total of 18,000 journals are currently supported in the database.
The service takes its aim at the researchers themselves and includes explanations for the interested beginner. The information is compiled from a larger number of services and will continually be updated. The service is designed to be a complement to DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org), which is also produced in Lund.
Welcome to test the new service. Please send comments and forward the announcement to fellow researchers and colleagues.
Best regards,
Håkan
---------
Håkan Carlsson
Biblioteksdirektionen / Head Office
Lunds universitet / Lund University Libraries
Box 134
221 00 LUND
Tel. +46 46-222 15 30
Fax + 46 46-222 36 82
Labels: journals, open access, services
access and having a voice
my sitting down to blog was triggered by reading the following blogpost:
Why Geldof’s image of rotting Africa is ok by me Richard M Kavuma
http://panos.blogs.com/africavox2007/2007/06/why_geldofs_ima.htmlthe above post is a commentary on the (de)merits of the cover of a
BILD Zeitung edited by Bob Geldoff, portraying an emaciated baby with headline: "30, 000 Menschen sterben in Afrika jeden Tag an Armut", roughly "30, 000 people die in Africa every day due to poverty". Kavuma goes on to question, then argue for, Geldof´s use of the image and (inadvertent) perpetuation of a stereotype; juxtaposing bad and good events, but letting the bad news gain the coverspot. well. i pondered in a similar vein recently when having bought the latest issue of
Vanity Fair magazine, guest-edited by Bono. Unlike Geldof however, Bono´s aim was to portray the more positive side of the continent, accompanied by lovely portraits by Annie Leibovitz. my wondering in boh examples incorporated thinking about "who gets to tell the story?" a Western voice or one from the global South. and this goes to my general thinking on this topic of late, browsing then shelves of local bookshops; wondering why there could not be a
Tony Judt equivalent for a book on Africa.
there is always a tension between painting (or is it sticking to?) the dire picture as opposed to foregrounding the positive. and even when foregrounding the positive, that can be misconstrued somehow.
this reminds me that, and by way of example, someone had once said to me that in one of the chapters for the South African Masters degree that I did, I spoke "too highly" of Stellenbosch University; that in my writings I had come across as someone wanting to stress the superiority of the university (read for that, "superiority above other South African universities") ...that never entered my thinking i must say, simply because my mind doesn´t work like that. my very modest and good-natured aim had been altogether different, in that i was trying to highlight the positive and the long-time presence cf. absence of connectivity in South African universities. so let me explain.
in my study, in the part where i had conducted a structured record review of web sites hosted on the university´s domain (to see if they were making working papers available from departmental homepages), i had an intro which described/chronicled the general development of the "wiring up" of the university in question. in this intro, i had wanted to portray and emphasise the positive side; to indicate that universities in South Africa (not just the one under study) enjoyed connectivity from an early stage. this was some effort to counter the stereotype of a largely digitally-disconnected continent and academic populace. to counter, in effect, this notion of overall backwardness that often characterises opinion re connectivity in Africa. well. my point has always been that academics at higher education institutions in South Africa (bearing in mind that I am speaking only of South Africa here) do have connectivity, and as such, should have been, and should be, further along with self-archiving activity.
i think what we now see however is that scholars all over still display a wide reluctance to self-archive; which i find profoundly unfortunate. whenever i have gotten up to speak about Open Access, i had felt that, given an intelligent and reasonable scholar before me, that the arguments _for_ OA would prove convincing in themselves. that on the basis of thát, people would go on to share their work openly.
instead, what i see is that we get bogged down in some kind of thrust and counter-thrust; tilting at windmills and losing sight (often) of the larger issue of
access. yes, doesn´t it come down to that? and access in turn facilitates
having a voice. these can happen at two levels, or in two spheres that i want to particularly highlight here.
the one: there can be the need for physical
access; yes, just simple hooking-up to the Internet, and thát can
facilitate giving people voices, and the platform from which to highlight social or other plights. not to toot the horn of bloggers everywhere, but let´s face it, i´d rather have blogs than not have them, since it means i can gain information from channels other than big media giants.
two asides come to mind from the latter observation.
aside one: some people say that blogs are just self-indulgent fora for ppl with nothing better to do. that, their presence complicates the information landscape, and so, this complexity is held up as some argument proof for not having blogs. logically, the reasoning is flawed of course.
aside two: some people say that self-archiving, and the complexity conjured up by versioning (i.e. not knowing which version of an article is _the_ authoritative version) makes for an argument contra self-archiving. here too the reasoning is flawed.
we should rather be paying attention to how to make the landscape less complex, and find ways of navigating the landscape, rather than saying that the landscape should not, or must not change.
per chance, as i am typing this up, a mail has come in announcing one such effort to orient to the information lanscape. see "An ecological approach to repository and service interactions"
wikithe second: how about
access to research literature? just because i cannot fully comprehend a piece because it is way beyond my ken, does not make my having access to the article a useless endeavour. for, the thinking that infuses an article, though unrelated to my study domain, may still prove useful. or. a mere ability to have a look-see at cutting-edge research in domains apparently unrelated to my own, can be useful too. whatever happened to serendipity? that finding of a book in a part of the library you hardly go to, except now the library can grow and not be physically constrained. it seems obvious. some would say even utopian... thing is, i just don´t get why anyone would make a sustained argument for a closed-off library. and maybe, with the thinking that one encounters in domains outside one´s own, one could
add one´s voice to scholarly debates in one´s own field in a new way. (the ecology of repositories approach is but one such example. there is a neat raison d´être from the European University Institute in the reasoning given for their workshops on "
Questions, Methods and Results in Social Science Research" (QMR)" when they say:
The basic principle underlying QMR is that researchers –both individually and collectively - can greatly benefit by learning what is being developed beyond the confines of their own specific research agendas. Specialization should not be a source of defensive ignorance. But being exposed to –and taking advantage of – multidisciplinary criticism requires that researchers from different disciplines get to know which questions or facts, which methods or theories, which results or open inquiries, are being addressed by colleagues from other disciplines.to say these things seem so obvious that it nags the brain. well, i am reminded here again, in speaking of "access" and "having a voice", of my attendance of the union debate (see
webcasts at the OII, and
Tobias´ blogpost done during and after the event)
now, i like Tobias´post overall, but there is a slight discrepancy between reality and reporting, where he says "ok, we are well 2 hours in the debate and so far we haven’t seen any female members voicing an opinion…". when in fact it was that when the floor was opened up for Q & A, a number of women in the audience had raised their hands to speak, but they were continuously and apparently ignored (how else to explain it) by the president of the house. noticing this, i turned to Tobias and said "he´s not giving any woman the forum". then later,
JZ in his argument highlighted this very same gender-differentiation aspect. and though he (JZ) had phrased things differently, saying that the Internet provided a forum for liberty, even humanity, and for a spectrum of dissenting voices, which was in stark contrast to the binary yes/no door contraption for the debating venue...
(think: a double door, opens in the middle. at the end of the evening, a brass pole is placed vertically, down the middle, and people indicate their vote of for or against the motion, by exiting on the left or right). further, i would add that,unlike in the physical space of the Oxford Union debate hall, where women that evening had not been given the forum to speak, the Internet, in such circumstances, could facilitate the raising of the voice of those who were previously made to be silent. and that overall, the Internet as such was a means for greater civic participation.
i feel then that a similar argument is to be made for opening up access to research. that those previously made to be silent (researchers who work outside of the global (Western, mainly developed world) scientific agenda) can have a voice and a platform from which to give prominence to their works. but even those "in the centre" can also expose their works beyond some incestuous inner circle.
we
know, and experience
shows; that the current-and-inherited scientific publication and dissemination system does not facilitate much if any of the latter.
Labels: access, having a voice, open access
Date: Monday 11 June 2007, 13.00 - 16.30
Venue: Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London
Who: Academic and research active staff
Cost: free
The conference will address a range of themes relating to Open Access, including perspectives from researchers, publishers and funders.
Confirmed speakers and conference topics include:
Dr Alma Swan, Director, Key Perspectives, UK (abstract) (biography) The present Open Access landscape and what might be over the horizon
Dr David Prosser, Director, SPARC Europe, UK (abstract) (biography) Repositories and research publications: policies and politics (working title TBC)
Frank Scholze, Stuttgart University, Germany (abstract) (biography) Metrics in an Open Access environment: an infrastructure for collecting and aggregating usage data
Dr Astrid Wissenburg, Director of Information and Communication, Economic and Social Research Council, UK (abstract) (biography) RCUK position on scholarly publishing
Nick Evans, Chief Operating Officer, Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP)(abstract) (biography) Institutional Repositories and Open Access - a threat to society publishers or an opportunity?
The Conference will be chaired by Professor Nicholas Mann, Dean of the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
There will also be an opportunity for discussion and to put questions before the panel of speakers.
Lunch will be provided from 1pm, with the conference starting at 1.50pm.
Booking: [click here to reserve a place]
Labels: conference, london, open access
conferenciante /conferencer
first. an amusing quote:
QI Quote of the Day
“Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.”
ERIC SEVAREID (1912-92) US journalist
given the context, i guess he meant "broadcast tv networks", but my mind hopped to Internet networks and wondered whether the same could be said there. i don´t know. i just wandered (sic).
second.it is high time that i write about the UniPID/EADI
symposium of last week. more especially so, since they today announced an
Open Access Dossier on the EADI web site. Some background:
UniPID is the Finnish Universities´ Partnership for International Development.
Their mission is "
To promote and implement ethically and culturally sustainable development in the world through establishing long-lasting research cooperation, based on the principles of partnership and institutional cooperation, between universities in Finland and their partners in the south."
EADI is the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes, and aims to be the prime professional association for development and regional studies, with
member institutions numbering at least 150 across Europe.
the particular aim of the one-day symposium was to look at the problematic of accessing development knowledge. what was interesting to me was to meet persons from the development studies domain (one which i am not too familiar with). the acid test is "will EADI create a domain/subject archive?"; "might they consider encouraging (in some way/shape/form) their associated researchers to deposit their papers in an institutional archive?". i don´t know, and i am not going to try and speak on their behalf. but i did see some encouraging signs, in that the meeting was positive and upbeat, and there was a willingness to grapple with the Open Access debate (the EADI Executive were having their meeting the friday after the thursday symposium). you can see the programme and presentations linked-to from
here. as i prepared for the talk; mulling over issues particular to access to development research, i thought, imagine what could be achieved if only African researchers located on other spots on the planet could still stay connected and in tune with their country´s research trends by merely having good (unfettered) information to the research output coming out from their places of origin. people always speak of born-digital documents. so, let me use this shorthand. there i was talking to development studies researchers born-Europe, concerned about having and expanding access to development knowledge. but let´s not then lose sight of the born-Africa or born-LAm researcher located outside of, Africa or Latin America, respectively, who also needs to be "kept in the loop". because, quite obviously, we do consider that the born-African in-Africa researcher needs access to scientific output from his/her country (though it might not always be country-specific -- depends on the discipline e.g. some social science questions may be developing country-specific, for instance; sometimes agriculture, etc). imagine the plusses vis-a-vis countering brain-drain effects if you could just keep researchers connected
in such a way to their countries as i think too often when people leave for other climes the connections can become porous. and of course, what i say applies to all disciplines and not just that of development studies. i will not attempt to provide a summary of the papers presented, but merely want to mention my excitement when i saw the empirical research work of my co-presenter, Finnish musicologist Philip Donner. it was a good graphic illustration of the notion of "exposure to ideas", and why it is that we need more systematic archiving of such research materials.
he said "Finland has a number of valuable collections of cultural material from developing countries. Some of them are well documented, and they would deserve to be easily accessible in a dedicated archive. As existing archives have chosen to give priority to national content, it unfortunately seems to be difficult to find a working solution. This situation appears to be similar in other European countries. "
see for instance his video of
Selo greetings from Tanzania.
third.this brings me to a lecture i attended this evening. since it is
freedom day, it was rather appropriate that i end up seated in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre at the Saïd Business School here at Oxf. this was to listen to Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, giving the John Berger lecture, which he titled "Things subverting ideas: Africa in the British Museum". (if you´ve not read Berger´s "Ways of Seeing" then you´ve missed out... I read it at age 18 and it just about changed my life. seriously.) and MacGregor began his talk by saying "you look in terms of what you know, and sometimes knowing inhibits the looking". indeed. and then he went on to give an eloquent lecture on historical views of Africa, and of how much this has evolved during the past 100 years. for instance, he quoted from the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911 which claimed that Africa was devoid of development save for that given it by its colonial rulers, that it was "a continent practically without history" (yep, that was MacGregor´s quote from the EB), which he said represented liberal thinking for that time. and so he went, illustrating how some facets (and objects in the British Museum) proved that Africa had always been global and of course was capable of inventing lost wax bronze casting, creating hand-axes which were of aesthetic significance rather than just functional, how Europe had at a point been exporter of raw materials to West Africa (ca. rise of the Ashanti Empire) for processing/fashioning in what is now Benin.
(did you know that Gothic representations of the Madonna swayed because they follow the curvature of the ivory tusk from which they were carved?)
the long-and-short of the talk to me, was how scientific thinking progresses (or not). and more particularly, of how scientific, cultural, and historical thinking about Africa has evolved away from that represented by the 1911 EB. moreover he made an argument for multiculturalism (something i´ve been bumping up against, and see the lack of, in a lot of the legal literature -- legal pluralism as a rather PC notion, but something cast aside rather quickly in most of the scholarly legal discourse). but i digress. he said "we all need to have a deeper understanding of the histories of Africa." and "How do new histories get written?."
fourth.this theme of "looking" takes me back to the talk i attended yesterday. it was the talk titled "Next Generation Web in a Nutshell" run by the Science Enterprise Centre of the Saïd Business School. Last night folks from the OII spoke, so my coursemate Sangamitra and I attended. We were at the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre again. The speakers were Bill Dutton (OII), Nir Vulkan (SBS), and Jonathan Zittrain (OII). Well, of course, strictly speaking we would have heard it all before, given that we are OII DPhils. But well, it is interesting sometimes to see how something specialised is packaged for public scientific consumption. The talks were good. i finally understood the philosophy underpinning the stopbadware.org project. before, i knew its nuts-and-bolts, but somehow the context had escaped me. but this brings me to this matter of "looking" (as had been mentioned by MacGregor above), and Jonathan´s longitudinal illustration of the interfaces of various "computers" through the decades. what we saw was a series of limited vendor-defined fx. well, pick- or wake up your mobile phone. probably you have 9 little icons splashed across the screen. the scary thing, as seen from JZ´s presentation, is that this UI (user interface) pattern is repeated when looking back across the decades, and what it illustrates is the vendor deciding which applications you are wont to use.
what you end up with is that users resort/default to this
vendor-decides-the-fx-i-have model of information experience and use, since the threats on/via the network are such that the unsuspecting user prefers to rather then relinquish decision-making about the applications s/he wants to install/use, as the risks for attack just become too great. so we move closer to an idiot-box and away from a pc, in the end. dumb terminal, anyone?
the classic blogquote award goes to Jonathan for his declaiming that kids today see TV as a "weird soporific aberration" in response to someone´s question re web 2.0 and convergence.
that´s not funny for its content. no. i think it is true (depending on where on the planet you are; i mean, let´s not get carried away by the notion that "tv is dead" just yet. it still lingers in many parts of the globe. well, i guess he didn´t say "tv´s dead"...) bueno. well, i don´t have a tv here in the UK. i refuse, on principle, to pay a TV licence. same as i did in SA. that´s why "no tv". but.
the quote was funny for being a discordant yet catchy wordstring.
;)
--
fifth.about writing histories. i was today thinking and half-amused in my thoughts about south african literature, and questions around representivity. i never became enchanted by south african literary fiction at an early age (and the stuff they shove at you at a young age) simply because i couldn´t relate. i mean, i saw a copy of Olive Schreiner´s "Story of an African Farm" in the bookstore yesterday. nice story, saw the series, etc. but let´s get real, that was not my experience of life in South Africa. i´d not been to a farm
ever during my childhood. that´s because i was confined to the city and suburbs. and that was the thing: the literature being published represented the experiences of those who had access to the publishing scene and market. that has changed now. there are some stories out about life in the townships, for instance. and they even get translated into spanish (i recall seeing a work last year in casa del libro in madrid). and yet, that township story has not entirely been my experience either. but, in the end, my early unhappy experiences with South African fiction just turned me away from reading that in my idle moments. sometimes i wonder to myself what it is then that i would write, if i, of a day, sat down and gave myself this task of writing a story representative of
my South Africa... dunno... too ill-defined for now.
Labels: africa, development, EADI, OII, open access, UniPID
what an IR shouldn´t be...
i can hardly believe that i last blogged 24 feb. i´ve been to madrid, and back, and now the term has even ended here at the uni.
but be that as it may, here i am on my soapbox, to say: an institutional repository (IR) should NOT be a glorified (or even a less-than-glorified) bibliographic/abstract index! c´mon, thát´s why library catalogues went online to start with. to my mind, when i hop along to any one of the
e-prints- or
dspace-based collections, i expect, yes EXPECT scholarly works there to be available fulltext, and openly so. this is my understanding of the use of these brands.
my little rant is due to my minutes-ago experience of browsing a collection (more through happenstance), only to find that what was listed in the law collection of the IR were merely mostly abstracts linked to alternative locations (toll-gated journal publication sites) . in effect, where such locations then required access (sign-in / logon). no reasons were given on the IR page for their not simply providing the fulltext
in situ (right then and there). such misuses of the IR brands (by brands, i mean "e-prints" and "dspace") should be prevented. i haven´t browsed other collections within the same IR to see if this kind of thing i describe was/is a regular occurrence. nevertheless, the cases that i have seen are enough to provoke my ire.
in sum, universities and research institutes: you shouldn´t get to call your collection an e-prints or dspace collection if all you´re doing is providing a service which is in effect an online catalogue with links to a closed-access collection. for sure, this "catalogue" gives exposure to the authors´ works somehow (via this online abstract) and yet, let´s face it, you can´t pretend that it´s open access. this kind of misuse dilutes the notion of open access and distorts the originally intended uses of the e-prints and dspace softwares.
Labels: institutional repositories; misuses, open access
